 Lock and load for round two. The Helghast have been pushed back to their homeworld. The humans, sensing an opportunity to strike and end the war once and for all, send their best and brightest on a one-way trip. But the beachhead is bloody and things quickly turn to disaster.
1. Gameplay
The Killzone series is the premier shooter exclusive to the Playstation consoles. It’s essentially Sony’s Halo. Killzone 2 definitely brought the franchise into a new era of gaming. It’s a vastly improved game in graphics and gameplay compared to the previous Killzone title. However, the game is also significantly shorter and a bit less satisfying. While the story is easier to follow in Killzone 2 and definitely more complex, the ending was unsatisfying at best and, really, hilariously awful at times.  But I loved the intro! This game did some things very well. There is a section where the player can drive around a mech, which has its own machine gun and rockets. This was an awesome section and the kind of thing that should have been included significantly more in the game (considering how many of these mechs were present in certain specific sections of the game. There was also an awesome turret-based section where the player could fire an AA gun against enemy fighters. It was very World War II, something that I’ve somewhat missed since shooters went all “modern warfare”. The characters were also much more defined. In the first Killzone, characters tended to be stereotypes and were stuck with a specific weapon each. In Killzone 2, companion characters had a much deeper personality and had better dialog overall. This game isn’t going to get any awards for its writing, but it was vastly improved from the previous game.  The graphical difference between this game and the previous Killzone was huge. Unfortunately there were plenty of areas where this game fell flat. After a while the environments tended to blend together. There’s only so much brown, rusty, mechanical structures I can take before I start giving up trying to guess where I am. I understand that the Helghast are supposed to be gruff, military-oriented, dirty colonists but you think they’d have some sort of variety in their cities. Something that showed these people had lives and personalities and weren’t just murderous robots. I mean, where are the Helghast women and children? This is definitely the Helghast homeworld, so why aren’t there more obvious signs of life? The shooting does get repetitive after a short while and some of the weapons felt seriously underpowered (I’m looking at you, Helghast assault rifle). But the mission-specific events (like the turret fight and the mech suit) break up the monotony enough later in the game that I stayed interested to the boss fight. And once I made it to that boss fight it was almost impossible not to finish the game out despite my dislike for the fight itself.
The campaign of this game was surprisingly short, especially considering the length of the previous Killzone title. I managed to complete it in less than 6 hours on my first try (and that was with plenty of deaths and a near hour-long final boss battle). There is some replayability for players that want to find all of the collectibles or try the campaign on a higher difficulty, but without any choices or variability it will just be the same campaign as before. It was worth going through the game and enjoying it for 6 hours, but I’m not sure what this game offered to the shooter genre. This may have been the early age of multiplayer, but the single player campaign did little to innovate the franchise. I’m glad I played it so that I can be more familiar with the Killzone story and characters, but I won’t be going back to it any time soon. There was a multiplayer included in this game that, at the time, was supposed to be really good. However, this game is about five years old now and, considering it already has two sequels, it has no one left playing online. The player can try the multiplayer with AI opponents, but that won’t likely keep the player’s attention for long. o Frustration Factor - 6 This game definitely had its moments of frustration. Granted, despite hours upon hours of playing shooters on the PS3 I still can’t quite get used to the controller (and I’m still not sure why), so my first point of frustration was just trying to shoot the enemies in front of me. Seriously, it was pretty sad. Imagine placing a flower in a pot in front of a person, giving them a hose, and telling them to water the flower. Then imagine said person flailing wildly in every direction while spraying as much water as possible, hoping that enough of the monsoon hits the poor, underwatered flower in front of them to keep the darn thing from dying. That was me for the first 20 minutes of this game. Still, I can’t fault the game for that. My inability to correctly calibrate the horizontal sensitivity isn’t the game’s fault, it’s mine. What is the game’s fault though is this horrible (yet surprisingly short) ride that I had to take in a bucket in some sort of mining facility. The bucket had terrible cover and a lot of enemies shooting at me. I wanted to keep my shotgun (by far the most effective weapon in the game), but I needed something ranged to take out the enemies. It turned into a catch-22 that required nearly a dozen retries. The final, and by far the most annoying, was the final boss battle. Here’s a game that encourages the player to take the fight to the enemy, flanking and throwing grenades in the process. It encourages well planned strategies, especially those that expose the enemy and removes their cover. And then it gives you a battle where the main boss is in an inaccessible area while he fires down at you. It gets even worse when it turns out my game glitched the first time around and I spent 30 minutes fighting an unkillable boss because it wouldn’t allow me to progress to the next section of the fight. Maybe these were small beans overall, but it definitely hurt the experience. 2. Parental Notices
Violence in this game is fairly standard for a first person shooter. Hits will result in some blood from enemies but it isn’t a significant amount and it won’t stay visible for long.  You can just see the blood over the motion blur. Even when the player is using more powerful weapons like the shotgun, the amount of blood stays relatively even.  This is some of the most blood I ever saw in the game. Explosions do not cause any additional amounts of blood or gore. When hit, enemies simply fall over or go flying.  Grenade! Blood in cutscenes is somewhat more significant and definitely more noticeable. This is especially true if an important character is injured.  I've seen worse in PG-13 movies. There was one instance where gore was present. If the player manages to score a headshot with a powerful weapon (i.e. shotgun, sniper rifle, etc.) the enemy’s head can be destroyed. This didn’t always happen and the few times that it did were barely noticeable, but I did notice it happening a few times (especially later in the game).
Sexuality is not a factor in this game.
Substances are not a factor in this game.
Gambling is not a factor in this game. 3. Other Factors
There are no mod tools available for this game.
Religion is not a factor in this game.
Anti-law is not a factor in this game.
While this game did include multiplayer modes, its age and the fact that there are sequels currently available for this game means that there is no one playing online. As a result, the online community is not a factor in this game.
The only sort of “extreme sports” that occurred in this game is the landing vehicles. These aren’t included in the traditional sorts of extreme sports, but I feel compelled to mention it because it seems to completely defy any sort of logic (not to mention physics). The soldiers are transported by sitting on the top of this flat deck with no additional protection on the sides and only short railings to prevent them from sliding off. This vehicle can drop at freefall yet somehow the passengers stay fixed to the top.
Magic is not a factor in this game.
Language Mature language was interspersed throughout most of the dialog in this game. It wasn’t extreme (most of it came from the character Rico, who is supposed to be the more aggressive soldier type). However, the reason I mention it is because there were plenty of cases, especially early in the game, where it felt completely unnecessary and distracted from whatever else was going on. It seemed like the writers were trying a bit too hard to make the characters look and act tough. Later in the game this calmed down significantly, but there were still occasional four-letter words thrown around. Suicide
At the end of the game a number of the Helghast troops kill themselves instead of fighting the enemy. I’m still not entirely sure why, since they were tasked with protecting their leader from a numerically inferior enemy force. The main military leader, Colonel Radek, also kills himself after he fails to stop the main character.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Like what we do? Want to see more? Donate to the site using the button below!
Not sure what a term means? Read the definitions!
Not sure what a review section is about? Find out more information!
|
RSS Feed